Fiction and views on the digital society, information security and democracy by Stas Verberkt

In authentication, biometrics constitute the category that is seen as both the strongest and least accepted form of access control. However, due to the way biometrics are implemented, they are commonly degraded to fancy passwords. Even worse, by nature, one cannot revoke these passwords, which makes stolen keys even more problematic.

While the western world was praising the revolutionary forces in favour of democracy that Facebook enabled, Evgeny Morozov gave the world a reality-check with his book “The Net Delusion”. Facebook is not a tool that is magically going to democratise the world, it is merely a tool with many applications created […]

Whenever someone states that his computer uses super strong passwords that cannot be broken within a lifetime, security experts tend to react with this “obligatory xkcd” – threatening with violence will make you surrender. However, there are new efforts towards a “subconscious password” that cannot be extracted by force. This will […]

At least once a week there seems to be news about a major website getting hacked. Afterwards, all over the Internet lists with account information turn up and major panic breaks out. Commonly, those passwords are said to be “encrypted”, but still part of them gets cracked, as we saw in the recent LinkedIn case. […]

This paper has been written for a 6 ECTS course at the University of Twente in collaboration with Hugo Ideler and Paul Stapersma.

Due to the trend of increasing solid state memory and fast 3G and wireless data connections, mobile devices are increasingly used for storing, sending, and receiving sensitive information. With greater complexity on […]